Educating children better than banning sex offenders on social media in Canada: Online Child Safety Advocate

Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun07.04.2012

Educating children is a better way to protect them from online predators than banning sex offenders from social media sites or forcing them to disclose their crimes on social networks, says an online-safety spokeswoman. Merlyn Horton was commenting after recent moves in the U.S. to use legislation to crack down on Internet sex predators.

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Educating children is a better way to protect them from online predators than banning sex offenders from social media sites or forcing them to disclose their crimes on social networks, says an online-safety spokeswoman.

Merlyn Horton was commenting after recent moves in the U.S. to use legislation to crack down on Internet sex predators.

In Indiana last week, a federal judge upheld a law banning registered sex offenders from accessing social networking sites used by children, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others.

In Louisiana, legislation has been passed requiring sex offenders to list their crimes in their social networking profiles.

And Facebook is calling on Canada to open up its sex offender lists — which the public cannot access — to social networks to help them keep sex offenders off their sites.

But the difficulty of verifying identities on the Internet makes such efforts pointless, says Horton, executive director of the B.C.-based Safe OnLine Outreach Society, which educates children, parents and educators about online risks.

“Can you bar somebody from having a Facebook account? What if they have an account under a name they make up, under their brother’s name, or under the name of someone they pay to let them use their name on a Facebook profile?” said Horton.

“Identify verification is one of the biggest problems; it’s a huge issue online.”

For predatory pedophiles, social networks and the Internet are an “open avenue,” she said, adding resources would be better directed to educating youth rather than trying to enforce bans or requiring Internet users to disclose crimes.

Horton noted there have been cases in Canada where individuals have been barred from using the Internet because of their crimes against children. But instead of through legislation, this has been done through conditions on parole or bail release, she said.

Even then, people can find ways to easily circumvent the restrictions.

“I remember a particular case I got called on,” she said. “The guy was accessing and luring children through the public library.”

Terms of service for various social networking sites vary, with ones like Twitter stipulating that users can have an account only if they “can form a binding contract with Twitter and are not a person barred from receiving services under the laws of the United States or other applicable jurisdiction.”

Facebook’s terms of service specifically ban convicted sex offenders. By email, Facebook said it has been working with U.S. attorneys-general to run lists of registered sex offenders against its user base.

If someone on a sex offender registry is a likely match to a user on Facebook, law enforcement is notified and the account is disabled, the statement said.

In the U.S., citizens can access lists of registered sex offenders. However in Canada, where the National Sex Offender Registry isn’t made public, it’s impossible for Facebook to carry out similar searches for sex offenders among Canadian users.

“We believe that in order to achieve a safer Internet, governments should give consideration to new and more effective ways to share information about registered sex offenders with social networks,” Facebook wrote in response to The Sun’s question about whether it is able to search out sex offenders signing on to its site in Canada. The statement said the model has been widely deployed by the attorneys-general of several U.S. states “and led to the removal of such individuals from these services.”

gshaw@vancouversun.com

vancouversun.com/digitallife

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Educating children better than banning sex offenders on social media in Canada: Online Child Safety Advocate

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